Do We Need Libraries?

Libraries everywhere are under threat. After all, who needs a library today, when it is possible, without even getting out of bed, to find and read almost any book or article that has ever been published? One is tempted to recall the reaction by some to the recent news that Radio Shack had gone bankrupt: “Radio Shack bankrupt? I didn’t know Radio Shack still existed!”

I was asked to give the opening keynote at a combined meeting of the Library Leaders Summit and the Computers in Libraries conference this week in Washington, D.C. In discussing the future of libraries, the conference continues a long tradition of forward-looking libraries exploring emerging technologies, hearing from bleeding edge practitioners and sharing case studies of innovative libraries. My thoughts on the future of libraries are equally applicable to many other sectors that are facing the threat of extinction from massive disruption to their businesses.

Library of Congress in Washington, DC, (Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)

The Scale of Disruption Today

The scale and pervasiveness of the disruption that sectors like libraries face is amazing.

The disruption begins with products. The smartphone, as Larry Downes and Paul Nunes explain in their book, Big Bang Disruption, is resulting in a huge array of products becoming obsolete:

But the disruption isn’t limited to products. Whole sectors of commerce are under threat.

Physical banks with branches, tellers and checks are being replaced by online banking with mobile payments and digital wallets.

Taxis are being replaced by Uber and Lyft.

Video rental stores like Blockbuster have given way to online streaming by Netflix and Amazon.

Television networks are facing similar inroads.

Venerable retail clothing chains are being undermined by fast fashion firms like Zara and H&M, with product cycles that are completed in weeks, rather than a year.

And who needs to buy a car when there is Zipcar or Car2Go?

Do we really need huge hotels when a firm like Airbnb has 800,000 listings in 33,000 cities?

Most physical book stories like Borders have already succumbed to Amazon, and paper books are being replaced by the Kindle and other devices.

The last Encyclopedia Britannica in 2010, with 40,000 articles and 100 editors in one language, is no match for Wikipedia, with 35 million articles that are constantly updated by 69,000 editors in 288 languages. Will we ever see another Encyclopedia Britannica in print again?

Against this background, what is the future of libraries? There is no reason to think that libraries are necessarily immune from the Grim Reaper of disruption. Do libraries have a future at all?

The Computer Age Requires A Change In Management Mindset

For several decades, libraries have made significant efforts to make themselves relevant to the computer age with elaborate efforts to computerize services and develop new technology. Will this effort pay off?

To answer that question, we need to recognize that the computer age is not fundamentally about computerization. The computer age is about the change in management mindset enabled by computerization.

That’s because the most important thing that computers and the internet have done is not just to make things faster and easier for organizations. Even more importantly, they have shifted the balance of power in the marketplace from the seller to the buyer. The customer is now in charge. The customer has choices and good information about those choices. Unless customers and users are delighted, they can and will take their business elsewhere.

As a result, the slow moving hierarchical bureaucracies of the 20th century can no longer cope with the speed and complexity of a marketplace where success depends on understanding the wants and needs of fickle customers and finding ways to delight them. Ponderous bureaucracies—with individuals reporting to bosses, with roles, rules, plans and reports—simply can’t cope.

The economy that has emerged to deal with this new marketplace—the Creative Economy—runs on different management principles: self-organizing teams delivering value directly to customers with constant feedback from customers. The role of the manager is transformed from a controller to a coach. The team itself has a direct line of sight to the customer and can see whether what they are doing is leading to customer delight. The customer becomes the center of the organization’s universe, rather than being on the periphery, or not even present at all.

In bureaucracy, the management ideology is vertical. “Power trickles down from the top,” as Gary Hamel points out. “Big leaders appoint little leaders. Individuals compete for promotion. Compensation correlates with rank. Tasks are assigned. Managers assess performance. Rules limit discretion.” The values are efficiency, predictability and telling people what to do.

In the Creative Economy, it’s the opposite. The management ideology is horizontal. The central goal of the organization is to delight the user or customer. The values are enablement, self-organization and continuous improvement to add value to the user or customer.

These two ideologies—the vertical ideology of the Traditional Economy and the horizontal ideology of the Creative Economy—are incompatible. They have fundamentally different dynamics. When you try to plug Agile self-organizing teams into a hierarchical bureaucracy, you get continuing friction. It’s not sustainable. Either the horizontal ideology will take over the organization or the vertical ideology will crush the Agile self-organizing teams.

Forward-looking firms like Apple, Amazon, Zappos and Zara have embraced this different management ideology. Many books are now available describing management in the Creative Economy. The transition is being driven by economics.

The choices for the incumbents of the Traditional Economy are simple: change or die. Some organizations might decide, like Borders or Blockbuster, to die. Staying on the same course is not an option.

Three “Wrong” Answers To The Future Of Libraries

Forward-looking libraries are well aware that they need change. But change in which direction? I see three “wrong" answers to the future of libraries.

One wrong path involves merely computerizing existing services. This is a common mistake with every new technology: applying the new technology to what is currently being done. Thus when it was realized in the 19th century that an engine could replace a horse, the first “cars” were strange looking contraptions with an engine on wheels pulling a cart with passengers. The designers hadn’t rethought the concept of a horse-and-cart or imagined what would be possible with the new technology: the engine could be integrated with the passenger cabin to produce a comfortable car. Similarly, computerizing existing library services will result in redundancies that will limit any gains to be made from computerization. There is a need to rethink what services are possible with the new technology, as well as what is no longer needed.

A second wrong path involves applying the 20th century preoccupation with efficiency to the organization and merely using computers to reduce costs. The sad history of technology efforts over the last 50 years is that computerization by itself doesn’t reduce costs. Unless the work is redesigned, the costs of introducing the technology almost always outweighs the seemingly obvious gains in efficiency. So computerization by itself is unlikely to result in an overall net reduction of costs, nor will it save libraries from extinction.

A third wrong path involves a frantic effort to “build apps” for smartphones, without thinking through what the apps will enable users to do and whether users want that. The banking industry, for instance, is spending large amounts of money “building apps” for smartphones: it is a safe prediction that most of the apps will be unused because they are not grounded in users’ needs and focused on making users' lives better.

Five “Right” Approaches For Libraries

The future of libraries is a story that has yet to be written. I don’t pretend to have “the answer” to that story. The only thing we know for sure is that the story will be different from the story of libraries in the past. But here are five questions that could lead to the right answer. In fact, the key to unlocking the mystery requires asking the right questions.

The first and most important question for libraries is to ask: How can we delight our users and customers? This is a tricky question to answer. Answering it will require all the capabilities and ingenuity of the talented library staffs. Libraries will be unable to answer it if they continue to be run as vertical bureaucracies focused on producing outputs. In that form, libraries simply won’t have the agility or the institutional smarts to figure out what users really want and then deliver it.

This recognition leads on to the second right question. How can we manage the library to enable continuous innovation? This will involve a shift to the management practices of the Creative Economy, including the shift in the role of managers from controllers to enablers, the shift in coordinating work from bureaucracy and counting outputs to Agile approaches to coordination and assessing outcomes, the shift in values from efficiency to continuous improvement, and the shift in communications from top-down command-and-control to horizontal conversations.

The third question is: What will make things better, faster, cheaper, more mobile, more convenient or more personalized for our users? The most important words in this question are the last three: “for our users.” Changes that make things better for the library, but make things worse for users, are not the answer. We have all experienced how airlines have introduced changes that make things better for the airline, but make things worse for us as passengers. The moral of this story: don’t emulate the airlines!

The fourth question to ask is: What needs could libraries meet that users haven’t yet even thought of? We can’t solve the mystery of the future of libraries by asking users what they want: they simply don’t know! They can’t imagine the possibilities, just as users couldn’t have told Steve Jobs the future of music or mobile phones if he had asked them. Apple had to invent the iPod and the iPhone. Once users saw those devices, they said, “Yes, I must have them.” So libraries must imagine a future that users will truly want, even though users themselves don’t yet know what that is.

Using the right metrics to track customer delight will be important here. A informal poll at this week's conference suggested that relatively few libraries are using the Net Promoter Score (NPS) methodology. Instead, the metrics in use seem to focus on outputs, like numbers of users or circulation figures. Although we all love librarians because they are instinctively helpful, getting feedback from users about the overall utility of the library as a whole, using the NPS methodology, would give libraries a handle on whether their efforts to delight users are paying off—or not. There are no points here for librarians putting in exceptional personal effort, as they do. The only question is: are those efforts resulting in exceptional user outcomes in comparison to other alternatives that users have?

This inquiry would lead to the fifth set of questions. What are the things that libraries are currently doing that users already love? How can libraries do more of those things, and do them sooner, better, faster and in a more convenient, more personalized way? And how can libraries stop doing things that users don’t value or that even annoy them? In other words, libraries may not have to invent the future. They may be able to discover it. “The future is already here,” as the science fiction writer William Gibson said. “It’s just very unevenly distributed.”

We can also draw on the wisdom of French novelist Marcel Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” We have to recognize the future that is already unfolding right in front of us. What we need are eyes to see it.